What To Read This Summer
What we really want this year is a serious dose of downtime. That, and a big stack of great books to steadily work our way through. If you are looking for some great summer reads, these are the books that the Tonic team just couldn’t put down.
Once There Were Wolves | Charlotte McConaghy
Six and counting. Every friend I’ve recommended this to has loved it – not bad for a book I almost gave up on before I turned the first page. The plot summary on the cover – a scientist involved in a rewilding project in the Scottish Highlands, and her twin sister haunted by an incident in her past – had me convinced that I knew exactly where McConaghy was going to go with this story: the need to be free and the ties that bind; the damage that people do to animals and each other. And I was right. What I didn’t foresee, however, was how and how utterly compelling and how beautifully written this novel is. It’s one of those rare books that stays with you long after you finish the last page. Ute Junker
Where the Crawdads Sing | Delia Owens
To be honest, I usually have a slight aversion to anything that is Reese’s Book Club endorsed. I like Reese Witherspoon, and I even like her taste in books. But there’s something in me that just doesn’t want to be reading what the masses are reading. So Crawdads sat on my bedside through five lockdowns. Melbourne’s number six was the charm. Set in the late 1960s on the US North Carolina coast, Kya’s family have left her, and she has learnt to fend for herself. Most people in town think she’s uneducated and stupid, but somewhere in adolescence she has befriended the kind young Tate, and he brings her his science schoolbooks, which she learns to read. But (and here’s a slight spoiler) eventually the city folk intrude into her life, with chaotic results. What I did really love about this book was that it reminded me of the pleasure of reading. For one week, I was wholly immersed in Kya’s story, and felt like I was taking a leisurely bath every time I dipped into the language. Delia Owens’ previous books have been non-fiction nature works, which explain why the lush descriptions of the marsh and the animals that live within it are so vivid. (I also loved that she published her first novel AT THE AGE OF 69, PEOPLE.) It’s a book to enjoy, and a book to gift. Rachelle Unreich
Cider with Rosie | Laurie Lee
Laurie Lee’s Cider with Rosie is a memoir set in the immediate aftermath of World War I. It is both a coming-of-age story and a record of a rural England taking its first steps towards 20th century modernity, as symbolised by the motor car replacing the horse-drawn carriage in the bucolic village of Slad, the Gloucestershire setting that emerges as a central character in the book. Lee’s Slad is the backdrop for a lyrical exploration of the universal themes of growing up. From his first days at school through to the widening horizons that characterise his late teenage years, Lee evokes an almost mythic sense of place, from the stasis of the winter months and a world brittle enough to snap, through to long summer days exploring the valleys and towns that dot this part of the Cotswolds. Painswick and Stroud become planets to be explored and conquered and teased and forged into characters undergoing their own metamorphosis. It’s a beautiful book that deserves to be known and enjoyed – after all, we were all young once. Patricia Sheahan
Shuggie Bain | Douglas Stuart
This 2020 Booker Prize winner is about the stark and uncomfortable reality of poverty. It is also a reminder that everyone has a back story that has shaped who they become. We meet Shuggie Bain as a 16-year-old, living in a pretty dangerous situation in a boarding house in Glasgow, sharing a bathroom and hallway with dodgy men. I was terrified for him, not knowing that the rest of the story would be even more disturbing: a raw account of how he came to be in that situation. The youngest of three children, Shuggie was raised by an alcoholic mother surrounded by a revolving door of undesirable, often violent men. His siblings made themselves scarce around the house and disappeared as soon as they could find a way to leave home, leaving Shuggie to take care of his mother from a very young age. It’s a complex tale of life at its most miserable for those trying to survive in abject poverty. Little Shuggie manages to find a way through the hellish conditions of his childhood and there is a feeling of hope after all. Marina Go
Mammoth | Chris Flynn
Authors Elizabeth Gilbert and Christos Tsiolkas are at opposite ends of the literary spectrum, so when a book comes with plaudits from both of them emblazoned on its front cover, you know you are in for something unusual. Aussie writer Chris Flynn’s one-of-a-kind novel is recounted by a 13,000-year-old skeleton of a mammoth, who shares his story with an audience of fossils waiting to be sold at a natural history auction. It may be high-concept, but Flynn’s cleverly-drawn characters, and his dry wit, make it easy to suspend disbelief. Behind the whimsical veneer, Flynn tackles some serious issues in a book that is fantastical, funny, and incredibly moving. Ute Junker